Who Will Buy Delicious From Yahoo?

After causing a brief firestorm amongst the blogosphere, Yahoo! is claiming that they never intended to shut down Delicious and were instead attempting to sell it off to another company.

Is Delicious being shut down? And should I be worried about my data?

– No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.

What is Yahoo! going to do with Delicious?

– We’re actively thinking about the future of Delicious and we believe there is a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users. We’re in the process of exploring a variety of options and talking to companies right now. And we’ll share our plans with you as soon as we can. (Official Delicious Blog)

Note: As of this writing their blog is down, although fortunately for us there is a Google cache available.

Although Delicious was a force of its own years ago (perhaps second only to Digg at the time), it has declined in prominence recently as many users have moved on towards other book marking services like Evernote and Instapaper.

While the domain itself is valuable (especially if one wants to start a food blog), it’s unclear who would want to own Delicious, especially after the service became stagnate under Yahoo!’s watch.

Hopefully Yahoo! is able to find a buyer (especially one with talented engineers to keep it going) as shutting down Delicious would be a tragedy for many users still using the service.